Posts by Daniel 1

Windows 8 and life after KIN - Ballmer's hot summer

What's with this use of the word "Partner"

You should be careful with this word. I know Microsoft PR has been deliberately diluting it, in recent years, but a "Partner" remains a senior Microsoft executive - a high-60s or 70+ player - typically, one who gets a seat at the likes of the SPSA money trough.

In short, Partners are people like Terry Myerson and Andrew Lees - the Tweedledumb and Tweedledee that piloted the good ship KIN onto the rocks. There is no "Danger" of these Partners ever needing reassurance over Microsoft's direction, because they are the ones at the helm.

iPad, Kindle as readable as print... almost

I cannot help myself...

I feel compelled to observe, that it is whimsical, that the author of http://www.useit.com/, feels qualified to comment on what is, or isn't, a pleasant reading experience (although I cannot claim to be all that surprised).

Revealed: Government blows thousands on iPhone apps

Well, gee

Since we are told that billions, need to be saved, over the next few years, then (while the 40-odd grand, spent on some crappy widget software, is an almost comically-shocking waste) I would prefer to look towards finding out which ever wasterel commissioned this work to be done in the first place, rather than the work itself, since it's there, that the real savings can be made.

Why obsess over the odd thousand, when we could, instead, locate the desk, behind which, sits the "half-a-million-a-year-plus-bonuses-plus-pension", who signed the cheques?

Microsoft's .NET at ten: big hits, strange misses

You missed a miss

Hailstorm.

Not an integral part of .NET, as such, but very much a part of the strategy. Fell by the wayside, because, until Facebook, no one could work out a way of forcing users to willingly spend their entire day creating unnecessary online data about themselves, simply so that they could unwittingly end up sharing it with absolutely everyone, everywhere.

ISS crew capture robotic spacecraft

Ukranians,actually

As in, not supporting the Ukranians, under any circumstances.

The KURS guidance system is now owned by a company in the Ukraine, and the Ukranians have been upping the prices on the units they sell to the Russian Space Agency. As a result, the Russian Federal Space Agency stopped buying new units, and the ISS crew now take out and dismantle the capsule-part of the KURS from each Progress or Soyuz supply ship that visits them, and store it aboard the station, for return to Earth and reuse on another flight.

Some of these KURS systems are now amongst the longest-serving items of electronics in the history of space exploration (beaten by parts of the US shuttles, themselves, of course). Many of them date from the days of Mir, when RKA still had a routine need for automated docking, and they may be getting a bit ropey.

So, personally, I welcome our valve-and-capacitor-driven Bakelite Overlords: try writing a computer virus for that hardware, Jeff Goldblum.

Beeb sacks teaboy, hires Press Association

No, we're on about Jennifer Chandra

Jennifer Chandra is the everywhere girl - the woman who grew up to be a meme:

www.theeverywheregirl.com

She's a redhead, just like the BBC's "Never out of the pub woman"... In fact, maybe it's a redheaded woman thing... since we also have "Nokia woman" - Yvonne Puig:

http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/5/22/in-which-shes-every-woman.html

Well, I've often thought they deserved Viz-like captions...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3040891.stm

"A goldfish, last week"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2458867.stm

"A drunk woman, last night"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/1879457.stm

"An even drunker woman - still there, while three o'clock, this morning"

(Maybe she's the Everywhere Girl's mum, in fact: "Never Out Of The Pub Woman"?)

She's a redhead, isn't she?

Haven't they just arrested her for spying - or is that a different Everywhere Girl?

Stock photos on the BBC website? Never!

Correspondents of Danny O'Brien's NTK newsletter were notorious, a few years back, for trawling the BBC news website's archives and sending in examples of how the news team would reuse the same stock photographs over and over again (often of marginal relevance to the stories they were attached to). Their pinnacle probably came in 2002, when they ran a story about a powercut in Oxforshire, which simply showed a black rectangle. I can't remember if they used a stock photograph of pitch darkness, or not - or, indeed, whether they reused the black rectangle on other, electricity-shortage-related, news articles, later on.

I'm still waiting for a version of this picture that shows the front porch of Television Centre, with The Everywhere Girl standing outside it, in grey pullover and a hat like a teacosy.

Google chief: Nexus One was 'so successful, we killed it'

Quietly brilliant

This time last year Android was in danger of stagnating. None of the manufacturers who shipped Android phones seemed to want anything to do with Google, directly, and the result was that the market was full of cheap-ass Android 1.x phones with locked down user interfaces and twelve-month-old feature sets. By working closely with Google to produce the best handset it could, HTC was able break out into the front of the market, and at take Android with it. At the same time, the company did a lot to achieve Cher Wang's ambitious goal, of turning HTC into a known and recognised manufacturer, in its own right. (How many people outside of the industry would have been able to tell you anything about HTC, eighteen months ago?)

In deciding to move her company away from being an Original Equipment manufacturer, to a high-street brand, Wang was taking a fairly brave bet. Google may have riled its partners with the Nexus One, but that is nothing compared to what happened to HTC's chances of going back to making OEM handsets for other companies.

The real lie that dare not speak its name, is that Google is still trying to work out how to pull off "an IBM": i.e. get everyone using your technology while not directly owning any of it yourself. The obvious step is simply to invent things so compelling that everyone has to license it off you - and if you license it to them for free, or virtually so, the chances of being hauled up for anti trust is much reduced. Everyone is far so busy making money with the things you invent for them, that they never stop and ask themselves if they have any other choice.

The problem facing Google, last year, was that people weren't even bothering to use the latest (or even a particularly recent) version of the operating system; and you can't do much to direct the course of events while that is happening.

Google needed to kick start that process, and largely succeeded. Would we have the present world - where every article about handsets dissolves into juvenile willy waving about what "handset X or Y could already do, six months ago" - if the manufacturers were still using the Android equivalent of RHEL 3?

eBay sticks sell-as-you-go on mobile app

Well, it make sense

Since the advent of the smart phone, the target demographic mostly buys things while blind drunk in the pub (rather than in the old days, when they had to wait until they get home from the pub to make all their impulse purchases). This has greatly increased the number of potential transactions, but does mean that the user base risks becoming totally impoverished, while blessed with a superfluity of old bicycle wheels, football cards and collections of rare chewing gum wrappers.

The logic must be that they can now also sell all of the stuff they are buying, as they go. Soon it won't be necessary to leave the pub, at all, as the same items will have been sold, back and forth, several times in one evening, before returning the the same owner who originally sold it. You could even sell that nice car stereo, that the cheeky rogue in the hoddie just passed you, back to the man they stole it from - all without having to leave the cosy confines of the Dog & Rose.

An entire pub-based economy will then arise, founded upon buying and selling rubbish to each other, in order to afford the next Guinness. From Babylon baby, back to Babylon.

Microsoft's KIN is dead, long live Windows Phone 7

Heh. "Poor Kin Team", or "Poor Windows 7 Team"?

I'll bet the Windows 7 people will welcome their erstwhile Kins-folk with the traditional warmheartedness for which Redmond is so justly famous.

"Please welcome the Wireless Server Team"

http://www.bugbash.net/strips/bug-bash20070730.gif

Russian spy ring bust uncovers tech toolkit

"Saucy"?

In all I have heard and read about this young woman, she certainly appears to be very attractive, wealth-motivated, and not a little vain (with a remarkable talent for embellishing the truth) but I fail to see how that makes her 'saucy'.

Is this just an El Reg thing - as in, "She's a young woman therefore she must be 'saucy'"? I assume Vicky Peláez isn't 'saucy' - for reasons that arise from an equally honourable chain of logic?

I'm almost tempted to apply a Paris icon to this comment, with a message to the effect of "Paris, because I gather that she's a woman, too", but having never used a Paris icon, yet, I'd hate to break a winning run.

Billionaire's betting exchange backs Android

Hmm, this isn't the sort of behaviour you'd expect from Google, of course?

Hey, I'm only saying - I'm no fan of the iPhone monoculture, either - but Google do have a habit of taking someone else's business model and re-engineering it as a vastly superior 'free' service, that they host. (I wonder, is "Google Porn" out of beta, yet?)

In fact, if anyone could reinvent the bookmaking business as an advert-financed enterprise, it would be Google!

Microsoft's 'New Busy' Hotmail has lie-in

Selling stuff people actually paid for was the old "busy"...

But 1% is the new "real".

Those of you who like to carp about 'talentless slackers in the public sector' really need to visit parts of the Redmond Campus, in order to see how the real professionals squander capital.

Nasa returns to the moon... in 3D game

Hmm

More like Farmville without the carrots, if you ask me.

Microsoft badmouths Google competition - again

Microsoft's 'dialog' with their customers?

Dialog... Dialog... Isn't that that gray modal thing, that pops up, every so often, with "OK" written on it (even when its really not okay)?

The long and the short-term of it: Apple's future

Truthiness

I would posit that Microsoft have such a LOW valuation, because there are now more than 50 billion Microsoft shares, in existence.

Ten shares for every human being alive; and each year, they dilute the stock even more.

Stop thinking about the companies and start looking at the stock. MSFT stock is worth much less because it is so common - and so each share represents a vastly smaller portion of the total pot. It's not complicated: a fifty pound note is a piece of paper, just like a five pound note is a piece of paper, but it's worth ten times as much because of what it represents... not because of the paper.

In pure capitalism terms, MSFT stock is probably still over valued by at least several orders of magnitude.

Microsoft's Windows 8 goals revealed

Plus, of course

Some miscreant could insert a lightweight boot disc for an other operating system, boot the comp, edit the RAM image on disc, then reboot the machine with the new, compromised, RAM image.

Of course, you can maybe try encrypting and sand boxing the RAM image... but that requires a boot process that launches a decryption service, first, from somewhere the bad guys couldn't have got at it, and decrypting the RAM image as it unzips into physical RAM... But what manages the decryption service, when there isn't an operating system running, yet?

Hang on. What was the objective, again? Fast restarts?

What they really need...

Is a file system that has any place being used in this century. Diddle around with the rest of it, as much as you like, but when one of the core activities of your operating system still using a code base that originated in early 1990s, your operating system is doomed to be a 'chugger'.

There probably remains a massive world of hurt at the heart of Windows Development around what happened over WinFS in Longhorn, and I guess that enough senior executives still hold madly entrenched lines against each other, over the "axing-not-axing" of it, but it seems like there is no concerted effort to move on from it in their commercial products. "WinFS", or something like it, or maybe something not like it, will be along 'Real soon Now' - and has been for over half a decade.

Either deliver a smooth, lightweight WinFS for use in future Windows, or drop it for good, and develop something else. People buying Windows 7, today, are buying NTFS - and that's just mad. Goodness knows, there are enough examples of implementations they can just copy, if they must copy; but to continue using an approach to disc data-management which made sense in an age when quarter gig was a BIG hard drive, no longer makes sense.

Over integration and over optimisation has long been cited as a key Windows flaw (the famous "50 dependency layers" from Phil Su's "Broken Windows Theory") - and it remains astonishing that people in COSD will assert that it is physically impossible for any one human being to understand how a job of work gets from the interface level of Windows, down to the hardware layer, and back again - but *that* file system is one part, that they could surely dump, in order to reduce that number of layers, and thus human beings needed, to a more reasonable level?

Or has WinFS already grown beyond 50 dependency layers, all by itself, and that's why they're so coy about using it outside of a lab?

There comes a point where backwards-compatibility becomes an obstacle to proceeding forwards.

Microsoft PR boss sweats in face of Apollo Creed Apple, Google... world

"Tell it to your co-workers here at Microsoft, to your family and friends, to members of the media."

"...In fact, tell it to the green grocer, the shoemaker, the basket weaver...

Whoever will listen... but FOR FUCK'S SAKE...

STOP POSTING IT ON MINIMSFT !!!11!1!"

Avro Vulcan - The Owners' Workshop Manual

Well, since you ask

Well, these "Tom Clancy's HAWX" and whatever it is you're on about - I assume these are computer games. The tone of your reply pretty much characterises the sneering attitude which has become the default communication protocol of the Internet.

Lack of rudder authority was the main reason aircrews disliked the Vulcan. All of the control surfaces had trouble overcoming the ship['s vast wingspan, but the tail fin was the glaring feature of the lot.

The problem was brought to the attention of the top brass after the loss of XM601, in 1964, where loss of rudder authority (following an approach on asymetric power) was directly attributed as the cause of the crash. However, lack of authority from control surfaces was a well-established problem amongst those who had been lucky enough to recover from it in a Vulcan, long before this crash. Indeed many of those individuals were among those whose testimony came to acknowledge the problem, following the XM601 inquest.

And yes, many Vulcans did crash simply because they flew at altitudes "where people could see them". My father's squadron was 44, Rhodesia - the first to convert to low level flying - and the Vulcan was an utterly diasterous low level airplane (worse, even, than the Canberas he went on to, in fact). Six of my father's friends were killed in an accident that was put down to pilot error, but which many in the squadron believed to be the result of catastrophic airframe failure brought on by low level flying.

Now, Vulcan is a lovely looking thing (just as the new Typhoon is, in fact), but it was bought for a type of war that was never actually fought, and then forced into a type of war it wasn't any good at. Somehow we revile our bad military procurement purchases when we're still paying for them, but enshrine them in myth, once a covering of sepia and patina has developed on them.

We should get XH558 flying, to immortalise what, exactly? And at airshows?

XL390 (the last full-aircrew loss in a Vulcan) crashed at an air display in Illinois, in the early 70s and the likelihood there, is that - had they been flying at 40,000ft, as the ship was designed to do, rather than the 400ft dictated by air shows, the crew might at least have had time to get out of the thing before it hit the deck.

Vulcans had a way of going out of control which made them especially difficult to escape from. Aircrews disliked that, naturally. It seems the reality of the situation is being painted out of the history by people who want to get this thing flying because of some truth that was never real.

So, yes, by all means fly a high altitude bomber at low altitudes until it's airframe collapses, but forgive me for not donating money to help you do this. I did not regard this as a good use of my money, when the RAF was doing, it using the public funds. I'll be damned if I'll volunteer to do it.

Yes, right...

I'm perfectly aware of it.

I'm also perfectly aware of the fact that a 'hero' is some sort of a weird sandwich, and so I can only assume - from your heroic attitude to flying a plane which tends to crash in ways which make successful ejection practically impossible - that you either intend to fly the thing, yourself, or you're some sort of a weird sandwich.

If the crew of X390, at Glenview, had had 40,000 feet, instead of just 400ft, to recover, they might have been at least able to get out of the thing before it hit the ground. I can think of few aircraft types less suited to air displays than V Bombers.

However, I suppose if deliberately flying a high altitude bomber at low altitudes, until the airframe completely gives, out was good enough for the RAF, then if must be good enough for you. Forgive me if I pass on the opportunity to fund this exercise, however, since I didn't think it was a good way of spending my money, while the RAF were doing it.

Welll....

If XH558 stays on the ground, there's a substantially improved chance we'll still have XH558 to look at. It was only by flying these things, that you imperil them and all aboard them. They weren't supposed to fly at altitudes where people on the ground could see them, and that was why so many of them crashed. This is a plane whose rudder couldn't stop it from spinning like a dish, if you powered up one bank of engines faster than the other. Entire aircrews of good men have been killed by these bitches - and there's a reason why the only planes that look like this, these days, need computers to keep them in the air.

"Discover what it was like to fly the mighty V- bomber during the Cold War"

According to my dad, it was like driving a very cold, damp bus, that you couldn't see out of, while wearing an Irvin jacket that you'd have though was made of concrete, if it didn't smell so strongly of dead sheep.

Just because you can fly them doesn't mean you should. Where's the collection box to keep the Last Working Starfighter in the air?

Apple, Google, Microsoft – are you a Brand Taliban or Brand Evangelist?

"Fiji"

Clearly you've never been to a Rugby Union match, where they were playing.

Video calling impresses Brits, if it's Apple video calling

Because...

They all had it fifteen years ago on their Blokia XYZ GgGgG BiCap9000 (the petrol generator version - only one in the country... can't think why...) They usually get about half way through a long rant about it, before announcing "rant over" - and then proceed to continue ranting for the rest of the post.

Personally, I think ts interesting. I won't use it myself (I never bought the XYZ GgG... either), but I suspect customers will, and I expect to be having to incorporate services around it into my company's current offerings in a few years time. And even if the people who will probably use this service have "more money than sense", then that's fine... Isn't that just the sort of people you want to sell things to?

Why try and sell anything to someone who wants to tell you how he already used it, after compiling it, for free, on a handset made from Bakelite, from some source code found on a paper tape, two decades before anyone else, and "it was shit." That's not a market; that's just some crank, in funny clothes, posting stuff on the Internet. (In fact, maybe it's always flopped, so far, because they kept trying to sell it to these guys?)

Apple not yet dominant enough for anti-trust action

"You can’t imagine someone bringing an anti-trust suit for print drivers."

Richard Stallman and the Xerox 9700?

Alright, he didn't exactly start an antitrust case, but he hasn't shut up about it, since, either.

Terror data handover seriously flawed

Look on the bright side

Once the US Secret service gets hold of the data, they'll put it on their own computers - and then the entire world will be able to read it!

Killer piranha stalk Folkestone pond

Furthermore...

It is interesting to reflect that a 1lb 4oz fish would have weighed considerably more than 1lb 4oz after it had eaten the entire arm of a grown man.

It'll be the overgrown pet of some brain-addled Kentish drug dealer, with a James Bond delusion.

Lightning bolt smites 60ft Jesus statue

True

Some one needs to tell them that they just lost a six-storey high copy of a recycled statue of Jupiter.

Home Office passport fraud sweep flops

I suspect...

...that it was Questions 76 and 77 that scared them off:

"Q76. Do you work for Mossad, Metsada, Kidon, or any other secretive Israeli special operations force?

Q77. Do you intend to use your passport to carry out high level assassinations in the full glare of the world's media?"

Really, they should have included a Q77b "do you have a really scary grin?", but I gather you're not actually allowed to smile in passport photos any more.

Steve Jobs – Apple's not business, it's personal

Are you new here?

"Yeah, down with Google. Oh, you're talking about another company that takes your privacy."

No, you don't get it. The rule, here, is that, if it's Google, randomly collecting stray bits of unencrypted data as they drive by, then they are an evil, advert-driven, monster. If it's some Chicken-shit developer in San Francisco who makes snoop software, for a device that most of the readers have an obsession about not-owning, then he's a hero, and a champion of truth.

After all, if people weren't obessed with leaking rumours about possible devices - to people who are obsessed with expresing why they won't own one of those devices - websites like the register would have less to report about, and, thus, less space to attach advertising to. (And people whose business is based around selling advertising are Good People, right?)

I'm sure if you go and look for it, you'll find there's a Wikipedia entry on "How To Read the Register and Maintain All Your Delusions at the Same Time".

Ye olde London comes to the iPhone

"I thought El Reg came from a rusty WW2 era bomb shelter"

You must be thinking of The Inquirer, mate: just like The Register, only with more sick on the pavement.

One day, no doubt...

Some day, Google (or someone) will probably do this with the Streetview database.

Every day reality may suck, for many of us - but just look at what a great augmented reality, we will one day make, for our decedents!

(Assuming we're not all back to horse drawn carriages, by then, of course!)

Apple iPad

Well, I won't get one,...

...but it's like modern Jazz, or Captain Beefheart: there too many people out there who appear to obtain something deep and important from it, to say that it's just noise - even if you are deaf to what they are hearing.

If you decide to run out into the street to shout about why people shouldn't buy this thing, then you'll just end up like one of those freaks who engage people in pubs about why "Shakespeare is shit".

If you have a negative opinion, then your opinion probably doesn't matter. Don't volunteer to be someone who doesn't matter - because if the entire IT industry is turning in a direction that makes, what you think irrelevant, then it's best to just keep quiet about it and try to hold on to whatever part of it still thinks that you are worth having around.

And if you think it's like the end of 'The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers', then that's because it is:

"Where you gonna run to? Where you gonna hide? Nowhere...

Because there's no one...

like you...

left."

Music biz pot calls Apple black

Agreed on The Amazon thing

"Here's all those pretty Friends of Ed books, that we ordered off you. There's a new version of Flash, come out, so we don't need them. What? You thought you'd sold them? No, that's not Amazon policy. You live in the online world, now - where everything is free unless we sell it. What? Gloss paper costs a lot to pulp. Ooh, double-ouch, dude! That must sting a little!"

Welcome to the 21st century. Remove all clothing and form an orderly queue.

Facebook forces users to expose or remove connections

Zuckerberg wants to be Steve Jobs, so much, it actually hurts to watch

I love the way the BBC and others keep calling it a "Social network giant", as well.

This must be one of those big, inflatable plastic giants with a bewildered man inside them, like they used to have on "It's a Knockout"... I want to be in the team that throws damp sponges at him, and makes him slide into the water.

Oz government in filter paranoia meltdown

"single greatest breach in the history of hyperbole", more like

What were they doing, inside places like the Lubyanka, for all those years, we wonder - if the privacy they breached, in there, wasn't as 'historic' as the privacy breached by Google, driving by and collecting enough data-packets to render about half a nipple, from people who couldn't even be bothered working out how to protect their privacy in the first place?

I would say that this man seems to have downloaded his sense of history off Wikipedia... except even Wikipedia has a fairly decent page about the 'Lubyanka'.

So, all I can guess, is, he never bothered studying history. Or anything else, for that matter. He's right, though: the Internet is a bad place. People can learn stuff on there. We should find a way to switch it off.

Windows Phone chief and Xbox brain exit Microsoft

One day, this will make a very good book

"What the Hell Happened to Microsoft?" New Riders, 600 pages, hardback (10% discount for Kindle version)

People like Bach will doubtless write some of the key chapters, but the editor will definitely be that 'Minimsft' guy (and won't it be nice to finally get to find out Who da'Punk really is? - like discovering that the writers of Ashes-to-Ashes actually did have a point).

Atlantis spacewalkers snapped through shuttle windows

John Carpenter's budget was too big

The inside of that thing makes the Dark Star look clean and high-tech. I'll bet they've both got spray-painted muffin trays attached to their chests.

Good job they haven't got a religious bomb on board.

Robothopter in biomimetic butterfly boffinry breakthrough

...and

The whether will be sunny everyday, and in the end, you get to kill Sting.

Come on, what's not to like about that?

2012 Olympic mascots cop a shoeing

Hereby rechristened...

"Hemlock and Mandleson" - the one being famous as the means by which one of the worlds great philosophers was killed for speaking his mind, and the other being memorable as a type of poison for which there appears to be no antidote.

Google backs open codec against patent trolls

Safari adoption is a near-certainty

Apple have more to win from the new markets for new devices, that could arrive from not having to worry about codecs, anymore, than sticking with a technology whose main aim is to restrict where it can be used and by whom. Data doesn't want to be free, but it does want to be useful, and right now, H.264 makes itself useless, simply by being owned.

After all, "they're going to see it all eventually, so who cares how they get it?"

Daleks poised to invade tour UK

Didn't anyone tell you?

By then, the Sontarans will have turned the whole of the South East of England into an empty radioactive wasteland, which - although devoid of all life - will look strangely appealing to those in the pottery and brick-making trades.

Steam rushes from Valve onto Macs

It is said that the cake is not a lie...

The other truth (widely accepted) is that you cannot have your cake and eat your cake.

Now sit down and enjoy your cake.

Javascript guru calls for webwide IE6 boycott

I'd guess Netscape Navigator 4 would fit the bill

Yes, Netscape Navigator 4 - that web browser that Firefox was, ultimately, based upon. Many now forget how pigging awful that browser was, to build for.

In comparison to that, IE 6 was, actually, a step forwards. Sometimes even a drunken step forwards is a step forwards. However, I once recall jokingly commenting to my ex-colleagues at glasshaus press, that - because of the way it was foisted upon its users - Internet Explorer 6 would eventually become the Netscape 4 of it's day.

That day has not only dawned (it dawned several years ago) but it now seems to have fallen itself into a perpetual loop: each morning, we seem to be waking up to that same bloody day...

The problem in China is not improved by the fact that the Chinese version of Internet Explorer for mobile is based on IE 6:

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/category/wtf/

That is why calls, like this one - for some sort of worldwide coordinated attempt to 'break the Internets' for all IE 6 users, at once - are, to quote Bruce Lawson, "An activity that is as cathartic as it is fruitless".

(Of course, these mobile users should all be using opera Mobile, instead... But I would say that, wouldn't I? And so would Bruce.)

The best option, is to do what we did with Netscape 4, and build-in graceful degradation, and ensure that the site is still usable in the crappy old browser, even if the layout is a bit borked. most users tend to assume its something wrong with their own computer, whenever something goes wrong - and in this case, they'd actually be right. Eventually, if it annoys them enough, they might ask someone clever, whether there was anything they could do about it - and in this case, there would be!

The important thing to recognise, is that the user came to your website for the content, and not the presentation. If you're all-presentation, and no content, of course, then you have a problem, but it's not a problem that forcing a new browser on your users will fix.

Microsoft drops second IE9 preview

"I want to avoid making a commitment on certain terms"

So, he says there's a lot of uncertainty, but he's not prepared to clarify how much less uncertainty there would need to be before it could be said that the uncertainty had been resolved.

This boy as commitment issues.

"We know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know"

Remind me' does he work in Software, or Astrology?

Google to be bookseller by summer

Publishing margins aren't that big

I'm not sure if the margins ever were, in fact, but Amazon's influence on the books market has ensured that the only way to survive in publishing, is by throughput. Amazon's brutal policy of simply returning copy that it didn't sell, meant that it could offload most of the risk and expense of print-runs back onto the publishers, while harvesting the profits of that throughput, for itself.

Now, this has meant that the book market has actually become much more diverse and interesting, than it ever was before - but it also means that book publishers have to work much harder, and take much bigger risks, to maintain the same, traditionally slim, margins.

With the Kindle, Amazon's business model was beginning to look positively evil. With no physical product to store, a monopoly-Amazon could dominate the market, simply by being able to hold each publiser to ransom, by threatening them with a:

'DELETE FROM inventory WHERE stock_id=' . $ASIN.

Their only expense was to maintain the database, and customers would pay to download content from it - at their own expense, onto a crappy, dedicated, locked-down electronic device, that Amazon had sold to them in the first place, and which Amazon still controlled.

But this is the greed of the Little Men: a greed that has to explain its evil plan, in great detail, to show how clever it has been.

Google's evil plan is so vast and devious, its hard to tell if it is actually evil. It will offer a business that frees the content from any device or medium, so that the Kindles will consigned to the back of the 'Cupboard of Redundant Thinking', alongside the LED calculators, Microcassette tapes, and daisywheel printer heads (still in their original packaging).

This is because Google's business model does not involve selling content - indeed it's predicated upon the idea of as much of the world's content being freely available and unlocked, as possible. The Google business model is based around knowing what content its users are interested in. (They don't want to own the books: they want to own the fact that you are interested in the books, because that fact is potentially much more valuable.)

Amazon does this, already, of course, but it hasn't the sort of scale that Google can dream of. Amazon is still a website - that you have to go to - whereas Google is slowly becoming the entire Web.

A very big river can shift a lot of water in a very visible way, but an ocean current dosn't have to move its water very fast, at all, to generate much more actual throughput.

Applesoft, Ogg, and the future of web video

Don't waste your effort on him, mate

He's just shuffled in from the cheap seat to complain about the nasty scary people, using a kind of software he doesn't understand; which fact makes him feel small and vulnerable.

Making other people feel small and vulnerable, when faced with computers, is His Personal Domain, and he has a lot of emotional baggage wrapped up in being able to do it (such as he extends to actually having motions, that is) so this scary stuff is clearly some sort of nasty conspiracy by Clever People who want to bully him.

He's not even reading any of this. Having successfully "rewired reality", by posting something The Internet, he's gone back to hugging a radiator.